Santa Ana River sucker rescue saves hundreds of endangered fish

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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Riverside-Corona Resource Conservation District, organized a rescue mission for the Santa Ana sucker and Arroyo Chub fish Wednesday in the Santa Ana River in Colton. The Rapid Infiltration and Extraction facility shut down for maintenance on Wednesday, lowering water levels in the Santa Ana River and endangered Santa Ana sucker.

Bailey Bingham, left, intern for the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District and Erin Barry of Pomona College, rescue Santa Ana sucker fish trapped in small pools of water Wednesday along a bank in the Santa Ana River.

“I never thought this section would get so dry,” Dave Woelfel, an environmental scientist for the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, said Wednesday.

Woelfel expected this deep portion of the Santa Ana River, just west of the Riverside Avenue bridge, to retain more water.

Woelfel was one of about 50 mostly volunteers working to save Santa Ana sucker and another native fish from a sudden and severe “drought” caused by the planned maintenance shutdown of a wastewater treatment plant upstream in Colton owned by the cities of San Bernardino and Colton.

In the morning, this group was “chaperoned” by three San Bernardino police officers on a four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle and a Colton police officer in a four-wheel drive truck.

An armed California Department of Fish and Wildlife warden stayed with the group all day.

There were concerns about the potential for violence from the significant homeless population along the banks of the river as well as worries about the dogs of the homeless and wild dogs in the area, group participants said.

This 2-mile stretch of the Santa Ana River is where scientists believe 90 percent of the surviving Santa Ana sucker fish live.

Plans are underway to capture some of them, breed them and release their offspring into three or perhaps four sites in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Unless the Santa Ana sucker is returned to healthy populations, water agencies planning for the needs of more than 600,000 people between Yucaipa and Rialto will not be able to move forward with needed water recapture projects and wastewater recycling plants like the proposed $128 million Sterling Natural Resource Center in Highland, which officials say will create 1,400 jobs.

Six teams were dispersed along a roughly 2-mile stretch of the Santa Ana River prior to the shutdown, at about 8 a.m., of the Rapid Infiltration and Extraction plant in Colton.

DROUGHT COMPLICATES RESCUES

Prior to the drought, water runoff and a higher water table would sustain the Santa Ana River flow during plant shutdowns, but no longer.

That change was first observed by U.S. Geological Survey team members in June 2014.

Now during shutdowns of more than an hour, segments of the river become dry, said Stacey Aldstadt, general manager for the San Bernardino Municipal Water Department, which operates the plant.

Wednesday’s shutdown was scheduled to last four hours.

Starting in early 2015, there have been four rescue operations, organized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for planned RIX plant shutdowns.

Wednesday’s shutdown produced the least Santa Ana sucker casualties of any rescue where a portion of the Santa Ana River dried up, said Kai Palenscar, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who organized the rescue.

Only seven bodies were found Wednesday, he said, where typically there have been 30 to 50, he said.

“We really dodged a bullet today,” said Carl Demetropoulos, one of the volunteers and an environmental scientist with Aspen Environmental Group, a consulting firm based in Agoura Hills.

Earlier this year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials confirmed the agency had launched an investigation into Santa Ana sucker fish deaths downstream of the San Bernardino wastewater treatment plant.

Like many of the other shutdowns, Wednesday’s was to clean aging ultraviolet lamps, which are used in the final treatment phase to kill bacteria and viruses before the cleanup wastewater is released into the Santa Ana River, Aldstadt said.

In an effort to reduce the number of planned and unplanned shutdowns at the RIX plant for ultraviolet light issues, the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, a regional water wholesaler that is leading the effort to re-establish Santa Ana sucker fish populations, wired the San Bernardino water department $1.2 million to replace more than 5,000 specialized bulbs.

Aldstadt said Wednesday that the lamp replacement should be accomplished at the end of this year.

And to replace the water to the river when the RIX plant needs to shut down for maintenance, San Bernardino hopes to retrofit three existing wells so they can be available for pumping onto the river in May 2017, Aldstadt said.

FAST FISH CATCHING

At station three, just west of the Riverside Avenue bridge, students from Pomona College and Cal State San Bernardino joined a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and an experienced Santa Ana sucker fish rescue team from the Riverside-Corona Resource Conservation District.

The Riverside-Corona district was hired by San Bernardino to help rescue Santa Ana sucker fish during shutdowns. An off-road ATV owned by the agency transported rescuers to the six far-flung points along the Santa Ana River.

As a pond, at site three, got smaller and smaller, this diverse group captured fish with nets — and sometimes hands — placing them in five-gallon buckets with battery-powered aerators to keep them in oxygen for their short stay in containment.